So Long Aunty Kate

So Kate Bornstein favourited tweets that were directly attacking me using blatant lies because they supported her "Tranny is okay to say and you all need to chill" narrative. 

That was the final straw to do what I should have done years ago; Excize her from my life. I've been putting it off for the longest time because of her cancer. I didn't want to be the girl who "abandons a friend over a philisophical disagreement". I wanted to be a supportive friend while she fought cancer regardless of how vehemtly I disagreed with her "Tranny" apologism.

But the EwPaul fallout has shown me that you can't be the nice girl when your friends are actively shooting your legs out from under you. Kate still, even through her cancer battle, actively promotes myths, mlies and utter bullshit to defend the use of the word tranny and is frankly condescending and dismissive of anyone who disagrees. Had she been ANYONE else that wasn't a friend I'd have blocked her for that shit YEARS ago.
But when a cis gay male drag queen started concern trolling me oin Twitter over my tweets to Kate imploring her to look at the harm she causes by pimping the word, expressing sympathy for my being hospitalized by a trans bashing but STILL insisting the word was positive despite how my bashers used it, who then started accusing me of "erasing Drag Culture" and somehow bashing Genderqueers and black gay people despite my ONLY ever having talked about the word tranny being a hate word and literally NONE of the shit he started pulling out of his ass, Kate Bornstein, my supposed friend, the woman who rode me like a racehorse to start writing an autobiography because she felt my writing was charming and intelligent and needed to be shared with the world, favourited three tweets where this man was directly personally ad-hominem attacking me because they pimped Kate's "Drag Invented Tranny so Tranny is Okay To Say" meme.

And that was when I realized. Sometimes you CAN'T be the nice girl.

Kate HAVING cancer was not a good enough reason for me to turn a blind eye and overlook her BEING a cancer to trans women. However much I care about her as a person and friend, she clearly cares more about pimping her Tranny narrative than about her friends. She saw me being attacked and she CHEERED THE ATTACKER. Because the attacker supported her narrative and I did not.

And I can no longer blind myself to the cancer of Kate Bornstein's beliefs, and I had to excise it. And so I did.

A Musing on Homelessness and Privilege

Tonight's episode of NCIS has me in angry tears.

I think about homelessness a lot. As a mixed-race overweight lesbian trans woman, I have very little privilege, but what privilege I do have is an accident of birthplace.

My personal privilege is being Canadian. I have access to free healthcare and a government disability pension. And those are literally the ONLY privileges I have in life. And those privileges are mine only because I happened to be lucky enough to be born in a country that has systems in place to help the disabled. And my disabilities are a bonus here, because if I was healthy I'd be homeless, as the welfare system here has a cut-off point. If you're healthy and employable, you find a job within 6 months or you're cut off, end of story. Despite the job market in Canada only being better than the USA in the way a KFC chicken sandwich is less unhealthy than a McDonald's chicken sandwich.

I am painfully aware that there is a very thing barrier between me having a roof over my head and decent healthcare and being on the street or dead. And while it may hurt my American friends and beloveds to read this, the cold hard fact is that if I were American I'd very likely be dead by now for lack of healthcare or housing.
Tonight's NCIS made a point about the statistic that on any given night, more than 60'000 army/navy veterans are sleeping on a street. If that's just military homeless, the number of homeless overall must be staggering. Because of my myriad of health issues and my resulting unemployability, and America's very broken system, I'd be homeless, with my illnesses untreated, if I was still alive at all.

The infuriating part is it doesn't need to be that way. In America OR Canada. Homelessness in BOTH countries could be virtually eliminated if conservative right wing politicians and their wealthy leash-holders, like (in Canada), Stephen Harper and Conrad Black, or, (in the USA), Mitch McConnell and the Koch Brothers, ACTUALLY GAVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES, and put their money and power towards eradicating sickness and homelessness, it could so very easily be done. If they cared more about human lives than oil profits and tax havens, about bloated military spending, they could easily make sure every American had a real decent quality of life.

My privilege is that I'm sick enough for my government to grudgingly pay my rent even though it doesn't give me near enough to eat. And it's a tenuous privilege at best. I have been homeless and could be again, and as I can barely function as it is, if I end up on the street, I'm as good as dead. If I lived a few miles south, I already would be.

All because a bunch of rich powerful white men care only about themselves.

And it just makes me so goddamned angry.

And now, a gif of a naked trans woman

Because trans women are beautiful and sexy and we shouldn't have to act like sexless nuns to be accepted as women and should be as free as any cis woman to love our bodies without being accused of being men acting out some sissy fantasy of being sluts.

A Musing About Riddick and Rape Culture

Okay, so I've just finished watching Riddick. I'd been warned by friends and seen in various reviews that in the third act of the film Riddick does something that would likely upset me. I watched the movie anyway. And I feel a need to address what I've read and been told versus what I saw.

Spoilers below the jump.

A Disturbing Trend

As the professional hate lobby loses battle after battle in their war on gay tights, and they suck less and less money from donors through fearmongering against gay people, I'm seeing a very unsettling but sadly unsurprising trend.

You see, the hate groups won't admit it publicly, (well, most of them, a few have conceded), but they know they've lost this contrived culture war against gays. They still fire volleys but there's no gunpowder left in those shells.

They know that more and more people actually KNOW real gay people. And knowing real actual flesh and blood gay people dispels all the fearmongering bogeyman stories that the Religious Reich likes to spin to scare the fearful and ignorant into giving them money. They know their donor base is either dying off or waking up.

The problem is that these hateful people, who swear they're not bigots while blatantly lying through their teeth about gay people to sow fear, NEED that donor money to survive, because as hateful and dishonest as they are, there's pretty much NO other way for them to have an income that grants them the life they've built on the backs of gay people. They NEED to have a bogeyman, an intangible "other" they can use to terrify the ignorant into paying for their mansions and caviar.

And so, while trans folks have always had to deal with ignorance and hatred, even FROM gay people, the Religious Reich in the United States has heavily ramped up the transphobic bile of late, stirring up more anti-trans fear than ever before, and it's working.

Articles about trans stories like that of Coy Mathis have always attracted ignorant hateful and stupid people to the comments sections. But of late the transphobic bile has multiplied. Where it used to be reasonably balanced in comment sections between the ignorant haters spouting bile and actual trans folks countering them with facts and reality, lately the haters seem to be drowning us out, overwhelming us with sheer numbers and shouting over us to drown us out. The hate is a flood now and it's difficult to not drown in it. 

And it's Religious Reich hatemongrrs like Tony Perkins, Peter Sprigg, Jennifer Roback Morse, Brian Brown, Peter LaBarbara, and Linda Harvey ramping up the whole "Transsexuals are just men in dresses who want to rape your women and children in bathrooms!!!" Meme that has caused this sudden surge in trans hate.

You'll note they almost never discus trans MEN when they spout their bile. Trans men don't even exist in their eyes.

And that makes it even more important now more than ever for us to stand up to these professional bullies, to counter their every lie with the truth, to dissect their dishonest fearmongering with facts and reality.

To show the world we matter as much as anyone else and have every bit as much right as everyone else to be protected from discrimination and abuse under the law. 

No matter how hard it gets, how much bile we have to wade through, how hopeless it often seems, we MUST keep fighting. The Gay lobby isn't going to stick their necks out for us. WE have to fight for our right to exist. 

Because the haters are getting us killed. And we have to disarm their transphobic bile as the gays did their homophobic bile, and render their bigotry impotent and powerless. 

Because the alternative is just rolling over and dying. And that is no alternative at all.

A Banner Week

It's turning out to be a banner week for me.

My e-mail stalker trying to encourage my suicide, telling me how gross and disgusting and fat I am, demanding I provide proof of my "bullshit claims" of Queer Porn modelling because HE doesn't believe it.

The misogyinst pig on Pulse Wrestling who now trolls me all around the site to call me a stupid bitch whatever I post, because I intelligently and articulately destroyed him repeatedly and sexist infantile crap is all he can reply with.

Sexist idiots on a mansplaining article telling me how they don't have to listen to anything I say or take me seriously because my pic shows cleavage, therefore nothing I say carries any weight and I'm probably just a rambling airhead who didn't understand the article.

Particularly stupid Pro-Choicers who think being as gross, rude and classless as possible when talking about abortion is the greatest possible way to fight the Anti-Choicers attacking me as being a meek stupid carpet who doesn't understand how activism works.

And a skeptical lazy idiot doubting my bbeing intersexed and asking me to name my particular intersex condition, even though I had already done so in the comment he was replying to.

Apparently wanting to NOT be a blatantly offensive cunt and therefore stoop to the level of the oppressors makes me a weak carpet. Apparently being open and honest about my body's defects automatically makes me suspect. Apparently possessing tits and not keeping them hidden like an 18th century schoolmarm magically renders my intellect non-existent. Apparently not blindly agreeing with a raving moron makes me a stupid bitch. And apparently being fat and NOT hiding under my blankets every day crying about how gross I am means I'm doing something evil and must be encouraged to kill myself so shallow men don't have to see a strong confidant fat bitch get more pussy than them.

Sorry but FUCK that noise.

I will make more people listen to reason with tact and class than rampant aggressive vulgarity, and save the "Fucks" for when they're needed.

I will continue to talk openly about my body and what was done to it when I was a baby.

I will tell sexist pigs what they're doing wrong even if I'm showing cleavage.

I will continue to trounce the moron who calls me stupid by politely and articulately destroying his arguments leaving him with only insults as a rebuttal.

And I will continue to be goddamn beautiful and fabulous even when shallow basement dwelling mouth-breathers who are likely still virgins and can't get a woman without cash up front rage at me because more women want me than will ever even LOOK at them.

I am Penny. I have survived things that would break most people. I have earned every single scar. I am intelligent and wise. And I am fucking BEAUTIFUL.

DEAL WITH IT.

Militant Atheist Skeptics Are As Bad As Fundies

If anyone wonders why my activism when it comes to dealing with anti-gay religious right bullies very specifically attacks ONLY the bullies themselves and their misrepresentation of their faith, rather than the faith itself or it's followers as a whole, it's because I acknowledge a simple universal truth; I cannot prove my faith is true anymore than I can prove definitively theirs is not, just as a Christian cannot prove definitively THEIR faith is true and MINE is not. No one can prove either one either way. I CAN prove, by simply reading the Bible, when a bigot is intentionally abusing his or her faith to justify hatred falsely, but I cannot prove or disprove that the Christian God exists, nor my own Goddesses. Christians believe in Christ, I believe in Hedon and her daughters.

Why am I bringing this up? Because of the one belief I WILL openly attack; Aggressive Atheism.

Not the average Atheist who simply doesn't believe in Gods or the supernatural and spiritual but respects others' rights to believe otherwise. I mean the truly aggressive douchebag skeptics. The ones who actively campaign to scold, tease, mock, attack and belittle those who believe in ANYTHING that isn't tangible. The ones who are every bit the equal of the worst fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. The ones who think ONLY what THEY believe (or disbelieve) is the absolute truth and everyone else needs to fucking fall in line buster!

As my dear friend Katie can attest, there most certainly ARE Christians who are perfectly content to believe in Christ AND let me believe in Hedon. She's a leader in her church. I believe she's ordained in fact. But she has never ONCE dismissed MY beliefs, or told me I'm wrong or sinful to not share HERS. Nor have I ever felt any need to criticize hers. She does me no harm, I shall do her none in kind. Simply mutual courtesy. I have NO problem with people like HER.

Conversely I also know Atheists who are like her. They believe there are NO Gods, no reincarnation, nothing of the kind, but they are perfectly content to let those who DO believe, well, believe.

I have no issue with THEM either.

I have issue with bullies.

On the side of belief, I hate Christian or Muslim bullies who try to shove their beliefs down everyone else's throat, who demand EVERYONE believe as they do, and ONLY as they do.

On the side of DISbelief, I hate the militant aggressive Atheists, who think NO ONE anywhere should believe in ANYTHING intangible. No God, no Goddess, no spirits, no NOTHING. The aggressive skeptics who feel a need to inject themselves into every conversation and talk down to believers like we're idiot children.

I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else believes, as long as they a) keep it mostly to themselves, and don't try to force it on me, and b) respect MY right to believe different.

I don't shove my faith down anyone's throat. That's actually one of my faith's few rules; Don't force it on others. I only talk about it if asked.

But I WILL not tolerate another human being, whatever THEIR beliefs or lack thereof, talking down to me like I'm an idiot for believing differently, and trying to force me to believe like them. If I believe I have lived past lives and that Earth has a soul and her children were Goddesses co-opted by other ancient religions how does that hurt you? I'm doing no harm, I'm minding my own business, and I'm not telling YOUR children what a flake YOU are because you don't believe in MY faith, so why the hell is it okay for YOU to do it to me?

I am NOT a flake or a kook or an idiot or a sinner or a blasphemer because my faith is not yours, OR for having a faith at all when you may not.

Seriously, fuck militant skeptics. They're as big a pain in the ass as fundies. Science does NOT mean "If we haven't conclusively proven it yet it's bullshit", nor does it mean "Well, we can't 100% conclusively DISPROVE this thing, so we'll round off and chalk it up as bullshit" either. Science means exploring the unknown, NOT dismissing it.